Barbarians at the gates – Ultimo is smouldering?

In other areas too we may come to see the world of the ‘empowered audience’ as deficient. Comment and opinion are everywhere on media sites these days, but there has been no similar expansion in facts, ideas and analysis, Scott’s much-heralded partnerships with the audience, like the barbarians attacking Rome, may be more suited to producing noise and colour than anything more enduring.

Fourth, it’s likely that the new media will be absorbed into the old media:

As the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the new Germanic rulers who conquered the provinces upheld many Roman laws and traditions. Many of the invading Germanic tribes were already Christianised, though most were followers of Arianism. They quickly converted to Catholicism, gaining more loyalty from the local Roman populations, as well as the recognition and support of the powerful Catholic Church. Although they initially continued to recognise indigenous tribal laws, they were more influenced by Roman Law and gradually incorporated it as well.

The ABC will still be the ABC with just a little more commentary from the audience. Not so much deliverance from the strictures of old media as an opportunity to join the slaves at the Mill.

The absorbtion is happening as we speak.

CNN’s iReport is IndyMedia on steroids, but without the awkward anarchist politics

TV on demand was YouTube

Twitter and Facebook are the cool new marketing tools that are supposed to help legacy media connect with YOOF

What’s also interesting is that Scott’s comments received a fairly critical response from many bloggers and analysts like Ben Eltham at New Matilda Breaking News: The Internet:

But, Scott continued, for those living under rocks for the past decade, times have changed. “The media Caesars of today seem largely out of solutions — and instead challenge reality by seeking to deny a revolution that has already taken place by attempting to use a power that no longer exists.”

The speech largely proceeded in this vein as Scott took great pains to describe the bleeding obvious. Newspapers are struggling. Classifieds are migrating online. Young people are deserting old media. Twitter and Facebook are cool…

…Instead we got a lot of new media and new economy nostrums. “All the rules have changed,” he claimed, and “transformational thinking and only transformational thinking will bring a true critical analysis.” Uh huh. “At the the ABC we are thinking of a world of 10,000 channels delivered to your TV set.” Good. “Sit in meetings with people half your age and listen.” Somehow, I doubt how thoroughly he has tested that one.

According to Scott, “Twitter might be where our future audiences and communities may choose to spend their media time, and we need to be there with our audiences.” 140 characters of bravo!

As I watched Scott’s speech and the ensuing questions, I began to get a sense of how clueless many media executives really are.

If Scott is among the savviest — and he may well be — then the path ahead for big media organisations in this country will be rocky indeed.

In the land of the blind, the man with a print-out of a Clay Shirky blog is king.

And also at New Matilda, a good piece by Simon Wilson which confirms that Rupert Murdoch is going global with his attacks on public service broadcastingNews Corp’s Chorus of Complaint:

John Hartigan’s speech in early July attacked bloggers at the National Press Club, claiming that their work was entirely dependent on mainstream news organisations, and that it lacked intellectual value. Last month, James Murdoch attacked the BBC at the Edinburgh Television Festival, claiming that they were capitalising on troubled times in the news business to further their chilling ambitions. And last week, in a major speech in China, Rupert Murdoch attacked “aggregators and plagiarists”, which has been widely interpreted as an attack on Google and other services that abstract content from news providers.